Chapter_5_-_Second_Half:_Random_Kindergarden_Thoughts

[Dave Monroe]

>From Patrick O'Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural
Paranoia and Contemporary U.S. Narrative (Durham, NC:
Duke UP, 2000), Ch. 3, "Engendering Paranoia," pp.
76-109 ...

"We can approach the 'point of the cry' in the novel
by attending to one element in the 'hum' of The Crying
of Lot 49: the network of auditory puns that comprises
its background noise.  At the conclusion of her
odyssey through the San Narciso underground an realm
of the disinherited, Oedipa comes to rest momentarily
at a rooming house where she encountrs another
voyager, an old sailor in the last stages of
alcoholism whom she comforts ... (126).  Glancing
around his paltry quarters, she reflects on the
sailor's unknown history:

[here O'Donnell quotes p. 126, "What voices overheard"
through "a computer of the lost?"]

"The image of the sailor's mattress, compared in this
scene with its prefigurations and 'luminescent gods'
to 'the memory bank to a computer of the lost' as it
records the excrescences of the material body and
desire, resonates with teh sound of the 'matrices' of
the 'great digital computer, the seroes and ones
twinned above' within which Oedipa feels she is
entrapped.  As we sahll see momentarily, the auditory
connection reevlas the extremities of the novel'
represenational regime in corporeal loss and
information overload.
   "Continuing her reflection, Oedipa contemplates:

[here, "the stored, coded years of uselessness"
through  "at its most quick," pp. 128-9]

"In this dense, compressed passage ... the verbal and
material relation between mattress, matrix, and mother
is forged.  Jean-Joseph Goux suggests a way in which
the 'symbolic economy' of paranoia that The Crying of
Lot 49 orchestrates might be read in terms of the
linkages between the sailor's mattress (the forcing
bed of sexuality and receptacle of bodily waste and
desire), the computer matrix (which carries the double
meaning of the mapped coordinates on which systems of
information and control are erected, and in French,
the womb), and the maternal function that Oedipa
temporarily assumes st the instnatiation of the
sailor's temporality--his placement within the 'dt' or
'time differential' of 'vanishingly small' instants
that accumulate in the movement toward death.

[see Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx
and Freud, trans. Jennifer C. Gage (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell UP, 1990)]

   "Goux writes that in the social symbolic ... the
'phallic dialectic' assigns the functions of 'witness
and control' (219), of 'form, type, notion, idea, or
pattern' (220), to the male (paternal), and the status
of negativity, concavity, and 'amorphous, transitory,
inessential material' (222) to the female
(maternal)....  The enactment of the phallic
dialectic, for Goux, esatblishes a privilegeing of the
symbolic over the material order ... of 'performance,
order ... and law' over 'the sensory, the concrete the
deductible' (223), our apprehension of which is lost
as the maternal body is repressed or abjected in the
constitution of the historical subject under this
dialectic.  The pieta of Oedipa and the sailor
emblemnatizes the phallic dialectic that governs the
whole of The Crying of Lot 49 and that Oedipa
mediates.  At the still point of a hermeneutic frenzy,
Oedipa is located between control and cry; between the
spheres of organization that create the paranoid
illusion of mastery over the symbolic order
(knowledge) and a recognition of what is lost in the
mapping out of our corporeal and linguistic indertion
into that order (history).  In Goux's terms, she is
located within the phallic dialectic.  This is to be
in between the novel's interconnected discursive
systems and the other or outside to them that is
figured as an 'incorporeal alterity' (219), such as
that of the soon-to-be-consumed
mattress/matrix/mat(t)er that constitutes the
disappearing record of the sailor's sensory, corporeal
existence across the 'dt' of a temporal history.
   "It is in terms of this phallic dialectic that
Pynchon engenders paranoia in The Crying of Lot 49. 
Oedipa occupies a liminal position throughout the
novel ....  As a woman on an oedipal quest for
complete knowledge, and yet as a nomadic figure who
traverses the boundaries of a migratory second world,
Oedipa is both a trafficker of information and
trafficked by the plots in which she is immersed. 
>From this position, she is able to observe the series
of connection and disconnections taht exist between
the articulation of identity mapped onto the 'real' ..
and the repressed matrix of that articulation, which
is the otherness of the body/corpse and its unrecorded
history given over to temporality....
   "In The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon charts this
dialectic rather than resloving it or attempting to
replace it, or even ostensibly frame it as a version
of the order of things bounded by historical origins
and ends.  At the novel's conclusion, Oedipa remains
suspended ....  Oedipa's waiting might be seen as
exemplary of both the postmodern condition and the
condition of language as we remain suspended in the
increasing gap between all the 'betweens' of signifier
and signified, semitoic and symbolic, maternal
materiality and paternal ideality.... residing
(waiting) with this state of supended animation
complies with the conflation of identificatory nd
capital fluidity that constitutes a major aspect of
the ideology of postmodernity." (pp. 87-9)

... and so forth.  No, I'm not entirely sure, either,
but it sure does SOUND interesting, at least.  But my
hands are killing me, so ...





__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make international calls for as low as $.04/minute with Yahoo! Messenger
http://phonecard.yahoo.com/